“Poof! I can hardly remember that far back. Anyway it is very uncouth of you to point it out.”
“Well, since I was never brought up to be couth, that can hardly surprise you, can it? I mean, it was not exactly a priority in the uninhabitable zone. No doubt couthness was absolutely essential when wallowing around in gold-plated bathtubs filled by vats of wine.”
“We do other things on Coriolis, you know.”
“Sure. Throw people into pits with wild animals, or have them encased alive in rexelene blocks. Very couth.”
“That word doesn’t even exist, and neither does couthness!”
“Does too!”
“Does not!”
Ledin looked over towards Grace and raised his eyebrows. She giggled; Six and Diva still liked to pretend they were fourteen again from time to time.
“Oh, and I suppose you think dictionaries grow on trees on Kwaide?”
“Fool!”
“Imbecile!”
“Moron!”
They grinned at each other, feeling pleased. The rest of their audience ignored them. These words were not new.
Below them, on Pictoria, it was possible to see the cloud base moving now rapidly across the surface of the planet. It was nearly dusk, and at the edge of the sunlit area the winds were now hurricane force. Ledin looked down, letting the conversation around him disappear into the background for a moment. He still found it hard to believe that he was actually 30,000 light years away from home. It was incredible. He had been born a no-name, like Six; most of his life he had only had one goal – to survive. It was a long, long journey from that ungainly waif on Kwaide to this privileged position on another planet. He looked down at the strange, red parallel lines of the hills running from north to south, and the tree-like effect of the pot-holed areas around the buttes. It was a landscape of intense colours – the red rocks and the purple sphere and rings of the gas giant beyond Pictoria. Then the intense orange-red of the star which hung huge in the sky beyond. It was absolutely nothing like anything he had ever seen before. He found himself thinking about his sister. How she would have liked this place, had she survived. It was identical to the planet of her dreams, the secret place she had described to him so many times.
“—don’t you think, Ledin?”
“Sorry?” He turned around immediately. “I’m afraid I wasn’t concentrating.”
“I was saying,” said Diva with a severe look, “that we have no choice but to go and look for the visitor.”
“To Dessia? Isn’t that … I mean, wouldn’t that be … well, a bit reckless?”
“It might.” Diva inclined her graceful neck. “Can you come up with another idea?”
“No-o-o. But maybe Grace can.”
Everybody looked hopefully towards Grace, but she shook her head. “If we leave him there they will eventually find out about Pictoria, and although they are 20,000 light years away they might be able to utilize the ortholiquid in the visitor bimorph to bring one or two of them here. That would be a major disaster. If the Dessites get their hands on the ortholiquid, they will be able to utilize its quantum decoherence properties to travel around the galaxy wherever they want.”
“Yes, but we don’t know they are as bad as all that,” said Six.
“We certainly do!” cried Grace. “You weren’t here when they got hold of Arcan, but the visitor was desperate. He begged me to fire on him, rather than let them somehow confine Arcan.”
“Then I hope we are in time to help him,” said Ledin.
“We have to go there. Now.”
“Can we?”
Arcan darkened. “Easily. The trimorphs can feel where the visitor bimorph is. I can take the Independence there now, if you like.”
“Well, I do think—” Diva’s voice trailed off, because the planet beneath them had disappeared, and been transformed into a very different picture. “—Arcan! I thought we were going to take a vote on it!”
“I already voted,” said the orthogel entity – rather smugly, Ledin thought.
Diva’s voice was sharp. “Yes. We can see that. Perhaps you haven’t quite grasped the concept of a votation.”
Arcan shimmered. “We all decide what is best.”
“Yes. But all of us – not just you.”
“But my brain is so much bigger. It is logical to assume that my vote must carry more weight.”
Diva’s fierce eyebrows snapped together. “I don’t know how you managed to come to that particular conclusion, but—”
“Err … Diva?”
“WHAT?”
“We seem to be attracting a lot of attention,” said Six apologetically. “I thought you might like to know, is all.”
They swiveled to stare at the console. Four blips on the screen showed that small spaceships were rapidly approaching their position.
“Are those spaceships like the visitor’s?” asked Diva.
Arcan scintillated. “They would seem to be, yes. Why do you think they are approaching us so rapidly?”
Six’s finely-honed sense of self-preservation had clicked into place. “Because they are going to detonate them all near our position,” he said. “They must use the travelers as missiles as well as for space investigation. I wouldn’t like to be a batch of neurons in any of those particular ships. They are about to be well and truly terminated. And so – if anybody is interested – are we. It looks as if the Dessites don’t stop to ask your intentions when you drop in to visit their planet.”
“Perhaps they will stop when they get closer?” suggested Grace.
Arcan swelled. “Impossible. They are still accelerating towards us. Their intentions can only be hostile.”
“Suggestions?” asked Diva.
“I have one,” said Arcan, but he darkened. “However, if you prefer to take a votation on our future course of action, then I suppose—”
“Just DO it!” screamed Diva, as the blips of the spaceships loomed ominously closer on the screen.
“Since you apparently do not agree with my arbitrarily taking unilateral decisions when we could come to a consensus,” went on Arcan, clearly miffed by her comments.
“Do whatever you WANT!” shouted Diva again, clutching at the console as a series of alarms began to sound on the Independence.
“—Because I wouldn’t like you all to think that I wouldn’t take into account your opinions. That would be unacceptable.”
Six cleared his throat. “I think you can assume we are all with you on this one, Arcan. At your convenience.”
“Thank you Six. Very well then …”
The view in front of them disappeared, and so did the spaceships.
Six glared at Diva. “Next time you are going to criticize Arcan, pick your moment better, will you?”
“I like that!”
“Good,” said Arcan. Everybody stared at him. “It is good that you like it,” he explained carefully, wondering if these small beings were always going to be so slow on the uptake.
Diva found herself with her mouth half open and nothing to say. She looked at Six, who had a sympathetic grin on his face. He shook his head slightly in her direction, warning her to take this no further, and Diva tried to take air in slowly through her nose and calm herself down. She was only partially successful.
“Where are we now, Arcan?” asked Six.
“I have moved us out behind the nearby moon,” said Arcan. “We will have disappeared from their screens. I think they will assume that their instruments picked up a meteoroid which disintegrated. I initiated a fall into the atmosphere before transporting away. With luck they will suspect nothing. What is your plan?”
Diva gave a bitter laugh. “So now you want to know our plan, do you?”
“Naturally.”
Grace moved one step closer to Arcan. “I think,” she said timidly, “that we should try to make contact with the visitor through the trimorphs. You did say that the trimorphs could communicate with the visitor through quantum non-locality, didn’t you
? Because of the lost animas?”
Arcan nodded his diaphanous ‘head’ and turned to the twins. They communed with each other and the visitor, shades of colour sweeping through each of them as they did. Eventually there was silence.
“The visitor is being held on the main planet, Dessia, as we thought,” Arcan told them. “The Dessites have somehow managed to make a holding pen for him. He tells us that he is unable to penetrate it. Apparently the whole island where the visitor is being held is artificially permeated with some material which they know as carbon nanographite. They use it to make the rock light enough to float on the sea, but it has the unfortunate side effect that it somehow interferes with quantum tunneling and decoherence. From the sound of it, I would say that this is the same material Atheron put into the magnetic plate he made, the one he tied Diva to. I couldn’t get near that either.”
They exchanged glances. This was not good news. It meant that both Arcan and the trimorphs would have to stay well away from Dessia, or risk getting trapped themselves.
A shiver of distaste ran through Arcan. “So it means that one of you is going to have to go down there.”
“I will go.”
“That would be me.”
Both Six and Ledin had stepped forward at the same time, and they touched knuckles with a faint grimace. The girls turned to look at them. Now it was their turn to speak at the same time.
“We will all go.”
“You are not going on your own.”
They, too, smiled at each other and this time Diva extended her hands in the open salute of the binary system. She could have kicked herself, because Grace paused visibly before giving a small swallow and reaching out with her own hands to meet Diva’s. They were only able to touch three complete fingers and the thumbs, because of Grace’s accident. Diva flushed, most uncharacteristically. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“That’s okay, Diva. No problem.” Grace gave one of her sweet smiles, but it didn’t make Diva feel any better. She should think before she acted, she told herself fiercely. Grace was the last person that she wanted to hurt.
Grace gave her a knowing look. “It really is all right,” she insisted. “Look!” She held up her hands for all to see. “Only three fingertips left!” She wiggled her wrecked digits in the air. “I have got used to it, see. No problem. Let’s move on, shall we?”
Ledin raised one eyebrow, and inclined his head slightly. The others looked rather confused. Grace was left with her mangled hands up in the air until she became aware of them again. Hastily she lowered them, and hid them behind her back. Perhaps she still wasn’t quite so used to them as she thought.
“You girls are not coming.” Six was adamant.
“We are too.” Diva stiffened.
Ledin looked over at Grace, and hesitated. Both girls were glaring at him with a savage frown, obviously expecting him to side with Six. He gave a faint sigh.
“I think we should all go,” he said.
Now it was Six’s turn to look like thunder. “Not going to happen,” he said, in a flat voice.
Diva’s eyes were flashing. “No Kwaidian is going to tell me what to do!” she pronounced.
“Diva – you have children to consider now. You can’t just go throwing yourself into any old battle that comes your way.”
“Oh? And you can, I suppose? What? Fathers don’t matter?”
“I’m a man.” Six sounded most surprised. “We have to do this kind of thing.”
“And I—” she lifted her head up as far as it would go, “—am a Coriolan meritocrat.”
“Yes,” he mused. “I know. Always thought that was a bit of a misnomer, myself. I mean, what has your family done to merit being the head of a planet?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Take that back!”
“Because nobody seems to vote on Coriolis, so it would be more accurate to call yourselves autocrats, perhaps even despots.”
“We are not!”
“No? Well – think about it.”
Diva’s eyebrows had met in the middle, and she was rigid with anger. “As if a no-name from Kwaide could know anything about it!”
Six looked at her sadly. “I realize you don’t like to hear this, Diva, but it is true. All that privilege! Your lot needs to modernize a bit.”
Diva was looking decidedly feline. “What do you know about it?” she demanded.
“I have been on the receiving end of your father’s idea of hospitality, and I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. And since one of our children is going to become the ruler of Coriolis then I think it would be a good idea to teach them something about fair government, don’t you?”
“No!”
Grace and Ledin looked at her expressionlessly and Diva thought about it. “That is, yes – I suppose we should. Really, Six, did you have to bring this all up now? We are supposed to be rescuing the visitor! You are the limit!”
“I know.” He preened. “But you started it yourself with all that meritocracy bit.”
“Huhh! So when do we leave?”
Six turned to Ledin for some support, but that worthy only shrugged. Six was forced to capitulate.
“Oh, very well. I suppose we might need all the force we can muster down there. You had better tell us how to get to the visitor, Trimorph!”
“He is being held in a building on one of the floating islands on Dessia.” The trimorph exchanged some information with Arcan, and the orthogel entity became a map of the area they would be going into.
“This is the main island, which is where all the exploration of outer space is coordinated. All you will find on the surface of the island is an open-air compound, surrounded by high outside walls, with small huts every twenty metres or so. The visitor is being held below here—” Arcan made one of the huts pulsate in flashing red, “—on an underwater level.”
There was a general groan. It would be far harder to get him out if he was being held underwater.
“But there are escape hatches all through the underwater parts of the city. Since the Dessites can withstand larger pressures than we can, and they naturally breathe underwater, they actually use the escape hatches as exit and entry points quite often. Dessia is a water world, and the air itself is saturated with 100% humidity, so you will find it uncomfortable.”
“Does it rain all the time?” asked Ledin.
“Most of the time. Some of the days are a wet sort of fog instead of rain. But it does mean that the air you are breathing will be very damp, and your lungs may suffer.”
“But the air on Kwaide is sometimes very damp too, and we don’t have any problems there?”
“No. The difference is in the temperature and in the pressure. Dessia is a very warm climate, and the air pressure is greater than that of Kwaide. You would, I am afraid, find it constricting, although you could survive for short periods without protection. However, you will all need to wear mask packs and bodywraps when you go bare planet.”
“How do the Dessites survive?” asked Grace.
“They don’t have lungs. Their whole body is covered by membranes which increase their surface area by 300%. They breathe through their membranes, and air is transferred to the blood vessels just below the skin. They couldn’t survive in climates like Kwaide, or Coriolis.”
“That means they will be desperate to find out how the visitor is still alive. They must be searching for ways to adapt to drier planets.”
“Yes. I wouldn’t give much for his chances. We have to get him out.”
“But these Dessites seem very technologically advanced. How can we get away from the planet once we have the visitor?”
“You will have to make it back to the shuttle. The visitor should be able to transport out, once he is outside the area of influence of the carbon nanographite which permeates all the rock, but he can’t take anybody else. Make him go immediately, though. Tell him to come here, to us. He can find us through the trimorphs. His abilities could put Pictoria in immediate danger.”
�
��Whereas they can get very little out of us.”
“You wouldn’t survive long enough to tell them much,” said Arcan. “Once your mask packs run out you would only be able to put up with the conditions down there for a couple of hours, at most.”
Six gave a nod. “Hmm. Not much fun. And we will be on our own. Arcan, you mustn’t come down under any circumstances. They know all about you, and they would keep you forever trapped on their rotten planet.”
“I will not risk myself, I promise. With so much carbon nanographite around, I mustn’t.”
“Even if we don’t come back?”
Arcan hesitated. He didn’t like the conclusion he was being forced to come to. “No. I will stay here – whatever happens.”
“Stay here, no. You must take the visitor back to Pictoria.”
There was a long pause. “Very well,” Arcan said finally, although they could all hear the reluctance in his voice.
“Good. Then we had better get kitted up, hadn’t we? And we will take as many mask packs as we can.”
Chapter 7
ARCAN TRANSPORTED THE space shuttle to a couple of metres off the surface of Dessia, leaving it to fall the rest of the way. He simply did not dare to touch down physically on the planet himself, in case he got caught up by the same compound which had trapped the visitor.
The shuttle landed with a stiff jerk which rattled Grace’s teeth inside her skull. She winced.
“Right then,” said Six happily, unsheathing his kris – the Kwaidian sword he always carried. “Let’s go!”
He and Diva were so eager to get started that they both tried to squeeze through the hatch at the same time, causing a bottleneck. There was a moment of eye-to-eye challenge, before Six waved Diva in front of him, rolling his eyes at Grace so that she knew it was not what he would have chosen. She giggled and glanced towards Ledin, who was taking all this in with one raised eyebrow and a small shake of his head.
The shuttle had come down on the main island – an extension of perhaps two square miles floating in the middle of an ocean which covered the whole of the water-world of Dessia. They were right on the edge of the ocean; Arcan had brought them to a shelf of rock half-way up the cliff which led from the sea up to the built-up area. Grace stared around her. The rocks were grey, streaked with patches of black which lit them up rather eerily. Rain was dousing everything in water, and visibility was limited through the impenetrable drizzle. It was like trying to see through a cloud, and gave the whole landscape a surreal feeling. She looked up. Diva was already half-way up the cliff, with Six hot on her heels, obviously determined not to let her get to the top first. She sighed, and looked down at her own hands.
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